Warren St. John

Talk story about Maureen Casey Owens, the document examiner who helped peg Joe Klein, the Newsweek columnist, as Anonymous, the author of "Primary Colors." She works in Wilmington, North Carolina, and doesn't understand the fuss: "For me, it was just another handwriting case." Document examiners are a subculture of fastidious, highly specialized forensic scientists who leave no piece of loose-leaf unturned to nab their prey. Owens, who is fifty-six, spent twenty-five years in the laboratory of the Chicago Police Department, including thirteen years as chief document examiner, and worked on approximately two hundred murder cases. In 1987, she went into private practice, and now spends most of her time on civil cases. In 1993, she helped prove that the highly touted "Diary of Jack the Ripper" was "not genuine." In early July, she received a call from Washington Post writer David Streitfeld regarding the matter of Anonymous. Owens earned her credentials through an apprenticeship, like all who aspire to be document examiners, and must be recertified every five years to show that she is up to date. Private document examiners work alone; their primary tool is the stereoscopic microscope, which helps them distinguish the details of a writer's style. They can trace a copy to a single photocopier, a document to a kind of printer, and can compare inks, which may look different under infra-red light. In the case of Anonymous, Owens compared a sample of Klein's writing with notes on an early draft of "Primary Colors" (which she has not read). Microscopic examination revealed "a tendency toward an open lowercase 'a' with a slight right-hand serif," Owens said, and "a wide 'w' with a low center and a curved ending movement," not to mention an "open 'g' with a straight downstroke." Four days after receiving the writing samples, Owens told Streitfeld the two samples were "entirely consistent"; they had their man.

Talk story about the biweekly meeting of the Nineteenth Century Club, a women's literary group in Birmingham, Alabama… There is no such thing as being fashionably late for the biweekly meeting of the Nineteenth Century Club. By three minutes of three on a recent Wednesday, all the members of the ladies' literary group had arrived at Mrs. Charles Clayton, Jr.'s opulent Tudor-style house in a Birmingham, Alabama, suburb, and had seated themselves in the parlor. There were flowers on the mantel and the sideboards, and the silver and crystal had been buffed to a blinding sheen. Even this display, though, was considered subdued. "Some hostesses have been known to get their houses painted," one club member said. A Birmingham woman may belong to several of the city's informal reading groups, but she may hold membership in just one of the big four: the Nineteenth Century, the Cadmean Circle, the New Era Study Club, and the Highland Book Club. These clubs, three of which are more than a hundred years old, are a cross between the Algonquin Round Table and the Junior League… Each club has about 30 members–roughly parlor's worth"–and places are coveted… Describes a lecture by Mrs. William Fetheringill, a law professor at a local university, on the Trail of Tears… Tells how this was followed with tea… The women sipped from china cups, ate cucumber sandwiches, anbd recounted the story about the absent-minded olderly member who read the same page of her lecture three times before anyone dared suggest that she sit down. And there was talk of the lecture on victorian mores by a member who repeatedly referred to the problem of "wo rees" in London. When someone finally asked her to define the word "wo-ree," the woman revealed that the word was actually "whores"; she had never heard it spoken. It was cocktail hour as the meeting came to an end, and there was some lament that drinking hard liquor was out of favor these days. As the women filed out, one of them wistfully recalled a late member who made 'a bourbon slush that would knock your head off."

Talk story about Gen. Barry McCaffrey, 53, appointed by President Clinton as the director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy–the "drug czar"…. McCaffrey has been going around the country with a message that is decidedly at odds with the tough talk of the current campaign season. A retired four-star general who led forces in Vietname and in Operation Desert Storm, McCaffrey believes that Americans should abandon the notion of a drug war. "The metaphor of the war on drugs isn't wrong so much as inadequate," he explained. "We're not trying to achieve total victory, it's not a campaign, and these people aren't the enemy." Tells how he visited a branch of Phoenix House in Long Island City, where, on a rainy afternoon, six recovering addicts gathered to tell him why "treatment works," as Mitchell Rosenthal, the president of Phoenix House, likes to say, and, indirectly, to make a case for government funding of drug-treatment programs… McCaffrey said he first encountered the issue of addiction's grip "in the Army in the seventies, when a third to two-thirds of us in the armed forces were nearly destroyed by drug use." His decision to give up fatigues for discussions of marijuana use and needle-exchange programs is mirrored by the commitment of the Phoenix House residents; they'd traded a crudely survivalist life on the streets for a rigorously ordered one… The General said he wasn't surprised by the poise of the residents. "Someone told me, 'There are no stupid people doing drugs.' The kind of people who get into drugs are sort of with it and daring." The comment had the flavor of a morale-boosting compliment to the residents. "If you think that the consequences and damage from chronic drug addiction are devastating to American society, and you want to do something, you've got to do this," he said, gesturing toward the facility around him. "Does treatment work? Of course it does. Now we've got to make the case to state legislatures and the US. Congress."

Signed TALK story about New York State Supreme Court Justice Harold Rothwax, whose nickname is the Prince of Darkness. Describes scene in courtroom where Rothwax denied reducing bail for a four-month pregnant woman who embezzled twenty thousand dollars. The request was denied. Judge Rothwax, who is sixty-five, started out as a criminal-defense attorney for the poor, was a member of the A.C.L.U., and for the last twenty-five years has served as a State Supreme Court Justice; he presided over the Joel Steinberg murder-and-child-abuse case and, more recently, the trial of the Brooklyn Bridge shooter, Rashid Baz. His legal career was inspired by Clarence Darrow and motivated by liberalism, but over time the Judge has become increasingly conservative. His conversion recently culminated in the publication of "Guilty: The Collapse of Criminal Justice," a memoirish diatribe against the legal system, in which Rothwax argues that "the American courtroom is dangerously out of order." His proposed solutions include permitting majority, rather than unanimous, criminal verdicts, dispensing with Miranda rights, limiting protections based on the Fourth and Fifth Amendments, and requiring defendants to put written versions of their stories into sealed envelopes before trial to prevent them from changing alibis. Typically, there are about two hundred and fifty cases at various stages before Judge Rothwax's court. On a recent "calendar day," the Judge held hearings on about a hundred of those cases. Judicial missteps–like Judge Harold Baer's recent decision that police in Washington Heights had improperly sized four million dollars' worth of cocaine and heroin–may get all the press, but in reality more than eighty per cent of the felony indictments issued by the Manhattan D.A.'s office result in guilty pleas or jury convictions. Gerald Lefcourt, who co-founded the New York State Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers said, the statistics show a phenomenal conviction rate. There are more people in prison in this country than ever before. Our incarceration rate is higher than any other democratic country's and we have the death penalty. The notion that the system coddles criminals is off the wall."

Talk story about con artist Joey Skaggs. There's a new hot-button issue in the American legal community these days: computerized juries. An artificial-intelligence expert named Dr. Joseph Bonuso recently announced that he and his colleagues at New York University Law School had successfully completed work on the Solomon Project–a computer program that, using "voice-stress analysis" of courtroom testimony and a process called "fuzzy logic," arrives at trial verdicts. When Dr. Bonuso made public the results of the program's verdicts in some notorious cases…he was roundly denounced by attorneys and judges, embraced by talk-radio hosts, and enthusiastically covered by mainstream media outlets like… CNN. But…take heed: the Solomon Project is a hoax–another score for the performance artist and media prankster Joey Skaggs. Skaggs…says that the Solomon Project was meant as a serious commentary on our judicial system and, specifically, on the Simpson trial… Initially, N.Y.U. offered to help publicize the Solomon Project, but after the school discovered that no Joseph Bonuso taught there, its attorneys threatened legal action. Skaggs, meanwhile, was em-boldened by the number of responses and, as Dr. Bonuso, began to take phone calls and grant interviews… Eventually, producers from CNN tracked him down. Skaggs was delirious: television is a hoaxter's promised land. He borrowed an office full of computers, got twenty-five actors to staff them or play reporters, and enlisted programmers to design something…to put on the computer screens… Two days later, after taping angry responses from some lawyers, CNN ran the segment on "PrimeNews." The story was aired repeatedly on "Headline News," and a multimedia version is still posted at CNN's World Wide Web site. It turns out that the reading public is more skeptical than the media…

Talk story about reforming the federal campaign-finance system. The case of Albanese, et al. v. the Federal Election Commission, Susan Mohnari, et al., in the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in Manhattan, seeks to eradicate the current system of financing political campaigns. …[Albanese] was brought by City Councilman Sal Albanese and a group of thirteen New York voters in the aftermath of his 1992 congressional race against the Republican incumbent, Susan Molinari. Albanese lost that race, and in the process was outspent $524, 000 to $267,000… Soon after his loss, Albanese rean an article in the Yale Law & Policy Review co-written by [John] Bonifaz and Jamin Raskin, now the associate dean at American University's Washington College of Law. Bonifaz and Raskin argued that the system violates voters' constitutional guarantee of equal protection in the same way as did poll taxes and whites-only primaries–practices that have been abolished by the Supreme Court… The solution he and Raskin proposed is one that Congress has scoffed at: full public financing of campaigns. After reading the article, Albanese got in touch with Bonifaz, who is now the executive director of the nonprofit National Voting Rights Institute, in Boston, and…filed the suit… The obstacles to Albanese v the F.E.C. are many, but the most difficult to overcome may be the Supreme Court precedent set in 1976 in Buckley v. Valco– a decision that equated private political contributions with free speech and thus gave them First Amendment protection That case, which Bonifaz called a mistake–the Plessy Ferguson of our time, is staunchly defended by free speech advocacy groups like the A.C.L.U… Bonifaz is also at odds with Common Cause, a group that has long been outspoken on the issue of campaign reform "our case is about fundamental constitutional rights," Bonifaz said We say you cannot have a political system in which the ability to have your voice heard depends on wealth" While awaiting word from the appeals court on the status of the case. Bonifaz made it clear that a loss should n occur, would only be a short-term setback, "if we lose this, we wont be deterred,' he said We're in this for the long haul"

Signed Talk story about direct mailings from charities during the holidays. "With the fiscal crunch in the cities now, governments can't help us with our bills," said Truda Jewett, the assistant executive director of the Children's Aid Society. "We have to raise more of our own money, so we have to be a lot more creative." Charities have sent out direct mail for years, but these days they're forsaking the tasteful written appeal for the same techniques used by promoters of those "free" vacation offers. Direct mail has evolved into an advanced, slightly hokey crypto-science, which employs extensive "psychographic" profiles of letter recipients, tomes of demographic data, and sometimes, sneaky methods of making you think a solicitation is an airmail letter from a friend in Europe. Some New York charities, like Covenant House and Hale House, have turned for help to a Massachusetts direct-mail company called Epsilon. Tony Mayo, Epsilon's senior director of fund-raising and membership services: "The whole purpose is to get the envelope opened." Covenant House sends out about 500,000 newsletters a month to donors. Smaller charities, like the American Suicide Foundation, send out mailings of only a few 1,000 letters at a time. An amazing amount of time goes into that piece of holiday junk mail. Here's a typical case. Last month, 50,000 New Yorkers received a mailing from the Bowery Mission, a group of 4 shelters for the homeless. Administrators for the shelters began planning this mailing nearly 2 years ago, when they hired Hemmings, Birkholm & Grizzard, a California direct-mail company. The writer describes the process of creating a direct mailing and interviews Randy Brewer, a VP of Hemmings, etc. "We get a lot of letters back saying, 'Don't waste so much money on fancy mailings,'" Rod Malloy, of the Mission, said. "My answer to that is, if people would volunteer and serve a meal and experience it in person, sixty to eighty per cent of those people would become donors for life, and we wouldn't need direct mail anymore."

Signed Talk story about wheelchair racers and the New York Marathon. On Marathon Sunday, as Bob Hall, a long-distance wheelchair-racing champion, and about seventy other wheelchair racers were waiting for the gun in near-freezing weather and a lashing northwesterly, marathon organizers and city officials scrubbed the wheelchair division's start. Winds had blown away boards on the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. Some racers were loaded onto buses, driven across the bridge, and deposited beyond the two-mile mark. Hall just left. "I was so disappointed I couldn't even speak," he said later that afternoon. Competitive wheelchair racers train with the same discipline and zeal as marathon runners. With fluid, mighty strokes, they can heave their lightweight, three-wheeled chrome or aluminum chairs forward at around 17 mph, about 30% faster than elite runners. Hall has raced more than 60 marathons all told, but his first competition in New York was in a courtroom: in 1977, he had to obtain an order compelling the New York Road Runners Club to allow him to enter its marathon. Hall believes that much of the press coverage of wheelchair racers here has been imbued with "the stereotype that we're in constant need of assistance." Allan Steinfeld, the president of the Road Runners Club, said after the race that he had decided to bus the wheelchair racers across the bridge because "the conditions were adverse and created a dangerous situation–we were doing what we had to do." Hall and fellow racer Joe Dowling would rather have been left to their own devices. As it happened, they headed back to their hotel, changed clothes, and, in the afternoon, wheeled themselves through the lobby and out onto Central Park South to watch the marathon winners finish.

Signed Talk story about ABC television changing their soap opera "Loving" to "The City" on November 13th. The show will no longer be set in sleepy Corinth, Pennsylvania, but in New York City. Several new characters will join the cast: Sydney Chase, a bitchy media mogul played by Morgan Fairchild and described by the network as "a Rupert Murdoch in drag"; Nick Rivers, a failed musician who roams Times Square; Bernardo Castro, the industrious building superintendent; and Zoey, a wayward young con artist who hangs out in Washington Square Park and looks as though she'd wandered off the set of "Kids." Jean Dadario Burke, the show's executive producer, said that "Loving" was consistently tenth (out of ten) in the ratings. She proposed a macabre three-step plan. Step 1 was to get a celebrity lead: Fairchild. Step 2 was to move the show's setting to New York. Step 3 was the cast changes. To make room for the new characters, the network would have to dispose of some of "Loving"'s old characters. In this case, that task would be accomplished through a serial killer. Once the network endorsed Dadario Burke's proposals, she told the cast the good news was that they were not cancelled. The bad news was that half of them were going, and she couldnOt yet say who. Victim No. 1 was Stacey, played by the only original cast member remaining on the show. Stacey died by powdering herself with poison-laced talc. There was no blood in any of the killings. In all, eight characters were lost to the subplot: there were six actual victims, the murderer committed suicide, and one character moved to Florida, freaked out by all the senseless death. The serial-killer plot has caused a surge in ratings. The new show is based around a building on Greene Street in SoHo. The hyperkinetic pace, funky camera angles, and quick cuts may at first jar those "Loving" viewers. The revamped show has the resonance of "Melrose Place" and MTV's "The Real World," with that dash of "Kids" tossed in for good measure. Last week, it was revealed that the serial killer was a Corinth resident named Gwenyth Alden. She killed not out of greed or revenge but because of a troubled relationship with her family.